The tangled web

“The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department’s own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him. After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars.” ―Thomas Sowell

“As Mr. Hicks testified, his superiors in Washington knew early that night that a well-executed terrorist attack with the possible participation of al-Qaeda elements was under way. Instead of responding, the most powerful figures in the government decided that an unseen YouTube video better served their political needs. And, in the most revealing glimpse of the administration’s depravity, the president and secretary of state peddled the lie even in their mawkish eulogies to their buddy ‘Chris’ and three other dead Americans. They lied to the victims’ coffins and then strolled over to lie to the bereaved, Hillary telling the Woods family that ‘we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.’ And she did. The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi. It was such a great act of misdirection Hillary should have worn spangled tights and sawn Stevens’s casket in half.” ―Mark Steyn

“The Obama administration undoubtedly understood that its decision to leave defenseless Americans, including our ambassador, to needlessly die at the hands of al-Qaeda-linked jihadists would not go over well for a commander-in-chief in the throes of a presidential election and a secretary of state angling for the Oval Office in 2016. Hicks’ testimony affirmed suspicions that administration officials conspired to conceal the nature of the attack by concocting an absolutely fictitious account of events involving a ‘spontaneous’ attack prompted by an anti-Islam YouTube video. Hicks testified that he had personally told former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Benghazi raid was a terrorist attack at 2 a.m. that same night. He recounted that ‘everybody in the mission’ believed it was an act of terror ‘from the get-go,’ a reality echoed by Libyan President Mohammed al-Magariaf, who said his government had ‘no doubt that this was pre-planned, predetermined.’ Magariaf made this assertion the very day before UN ambassador Susan Rice went out to peddle the lie that a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ had gotten out of hand due to an Internet video. When Hicks heard Rice, he was appalled. ‘My jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed,’ he said.” ―Arnold Ahlert

“It remains little short of astonishing that the administration made no contingency plans for trouble in the terrorist hotbed of Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11. Were they afraid news of such preparation would leak out, jeopardizing Obama’s ‘all is well in Libya’ political narrative? Hicks said he was eager to see Special Forces units arrive, ‘because we had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum.’ As [Sharyl] Attkisson observes, ‘The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized.’” ―John Hayward

“Special operations forces were told, twice, by their chain of command not to board aircraft to Benghazi to rescue the Americans then under attack. The U.S. deputy diplomat, Greg Hicks, testified that the military commander, Lt. Col. Gibson, had his team ready to go twice. They were on the runway about to board a flight to Benghazi in the middle of the attack. They were ordered to stand down and remain in Tripoli to receive wounded who would be coming out of Benghazi. One of the orders came in the middle of the attack, the other came toward the end after Hicks’ team had traveled from Tripoli to Benghazi. The fact that Hicks’ team was able get to Benghazi before the end of the assault strongly suggests that the special operations team could have made a real difference.

“At the same time, the State Department’s commander on the scene, Hicks, ordered his personnel into Benghazi and went there himself. Hicks testified that Gibson never told him who issued the stand-down orders. He commented that Gibson told him that the military stand-down was a shock: ‘This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than someone in the military.’” ―Bryan Preston

“By the time the 11th anniversary of 9/11 rolled around, the stage was set for disaster. Not only had the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s State Department not prepared one of its most-vulnerable diplomatic outposts for a terrorist attack on the anniversary of al Qaeda’s greatest success, they had reduced security and ignored the pleas of their own ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. … Only after more than a week had passed would the Obama administration admit what had been painfully obvious: Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists had staged a coordinated attack on the consulate and another on a safe house a few hours later, and an amateurish YouTube video had nothing to do with it.” ―Edward Morrissey

“Obama and Clinton have insisted that they did everything they could to help the Americans besieged in Libya; they just couldn’t get help to them in time. That’s simply untrue. But even if that were true, it would still be a self-serving falsehood.

“If you see a child struggling in the ocean, you have no idea how long she will flail and paddle before she goes under for the last time. The moral response is to swim for her in the hope that you get there in time. If you fail and she dies, you can console yourself that you did your best to rescue her. But if you just stand on the beach and do nothing as the child struggles for life, saying, ‘Well, there’s just no way I can get to her in time,’ it doesn’t really matter whether you guessed right or not. You didn’t try.

“The White House and State Department insist they guessed right, as if that somehow absolves them of responsibility. They would have sent help if they could have, they claim, but they simply weren’t ready to deploy forces on Sept. 11, the one day of the year you’d expect our military and intelligence agencies to be ready for trouble in the Middle East, particularly given that before his murder, Stevens warned of security problems in Benghazi.

“But we know the administration ordered others who were willing, able and obliged to come to the consulate’s rescue to ‘stand down.’ They in effect told the lifeguards, ‘Don’t get out of your chairs.’ Though an unmanned drone was there to capture the whole thing on video, which must have been reassuring as the mortar rounds rained down.” ―Jonah Goldberg

Thanks, Diane. I always wish I had time to write something original, but my life has been way too crazy lately, and it’s so much faster to steal borrow the work of others. They said it better than I would have, anyway.🙂